Aboriginality: an identity draped in heritage

For the record, I do believe in Andrew Bolt's God-given right to make a goose of himself.

What I don't accept is that he – or anyone else - has the right to print whatever they like, about whomever they like.

In the course of the articles that saw him famously breach the Racial Discrimination Act, he likened a group of Aboriginal people to pigs at a trough; he accused them of betraying a race to which they claim to identify; and he accused them of theft and fraud.

And therein lies the real problem with Bolt's articles.

Apart from their vicious tone, the articles were full of factual error, something which Bolt and his supporters continue to gloss over.

The clearest imputation from the articles was that the Aboriginal people named only identified as Aboriginal in order to gain access to – in Bolt's words – "plum jobs".

All of them were raised Aboriginal. All of them have been Aboriginal as long as they can remember.

They did not change their identity to gain an advantage. Period.

In Andrew Bolt's small world, identity is apparently only ever skin deep.

You are how you look. Or more to the point, you are how Andrew Bolt thinks you look.

Attacking Leeanne Enoch, he wrote: "Why is she insisting on a racial difference the eye cannot even detect?"

Of McMillan he wrote: "[He] has received all the special help you once thought, when writing the tax man another cheque, would at least go to people who looked (Bolt's emphasis) Aboriginal, but which is increasingly lavished on folk as pink in face as they are in politics."

Larissa Behrendt, of course, comes in for a beating, with Bolt describing her as "very pale".

How does a young boy of, say, Chinese heritage, born and raised in Australia, identify?

Under Bolt's law, he's Chinese. Why? Because he looks Chinese.

Of course, he's actually Australian. He thinks Australian. He talks Australian. He identifies as Australian. Or at least, he does if he so chooses.

And there's another central point that Bolt just doesn't get – identity is a personal choice. Indeed, it's the most personal of all choices.

No-one, no matter how hard they might stamp their feet, gets to tell you how you should identify.

It's entirely up to the individual, although in the case of Aboriginality, there are some caveats.

The most oft-accepted legal definition for claiming Australian Aboriginality is that you must (a) have Aboriginal heritage; (b) identify as Aboriginal; and (c) be accepted as Aboriginal by the Aboriginal community.

The debate about the 'Aboriginality test' in Aboriginal communities is as old as the test itself. There are Aboriginal people who discriminate against others based on the paleness of their skin.

They are, however, no more enlightened than Bolt. And their views are no more relevant.

However, my experience with Aboriginal people is that the overwhelming majority welcome other Aboriginal people, regardless of their skin colour. They do so because they understand several things that Bolt does not.

First, they understand loss. A loss of land. A loss of culture. A loss of identity. A loss of wages, of children, of remains. With that loss comes a very deep acknowledgement of the importance of reconnecting.

Second, Aboriginal people understand that while you can become an Australian, you can never become an Aboriginal. You either are, or you aren't.

By contrast, the thing that binds all Australians – regardless of where they come from – is that we have collectively benefitted from the dispossession of someone else. That 'someone else' is Aboriginal people.

Which brings me to the roots of Bolt's frustration, and that of his supporters.

Aboriginality has a special status in Australia, because Aboriginal people are the original custodians of this land.

This notion deeply offends people like Bolt because they believe someone is getting something to which they themselves are not entitled.

It's straight out of the 'what about me' playbook.

That Andrew Bolt, a man of such advantage, should spend so much time worrying about what other people get just adds to the irony and, I think, speaks some volumes about his moral fibre.

So my advice to Bolt and others is simple: Get over it.

You will never enjoy the special status that First Nations people do. Suck it up, Princess. Move on. Maybe even learn to embrace and respect it? Or not. It doesn't matter a zip to Aboriginal people either way. But if you do, it will make you a lot happier in life.

And some more advice: dump the 'egalitarian Utopia' nonsense. It's old and silly.

Modern Australia is not equal, and never was.

Our constitution today still includes provisions specifically designed to discriminate against Aboriginal people, and others of colour.

Our first major act of parliament was the White Australia policy.

Aboriginal people were part of the Flora and Fauna Act until the late 1960s.

Today, we jail black males in Australia at a rate more than five times greater than black males were jailed under South African Apartheid. And on every social indicator, Aboriginal people lag way behind non-Aboriginal people.

And some more advice: if you're going to pretend that it's all about appearance, you need to spread the hate around a little more. Why, for example, did Bolt's articles not attack conservative Aboriginals? Surely in Bolt's eyes Marcia Langton looks no more or less Aboriginal than Larissa Behrendt? Why didn't she come in for a serve? Wesley Aird - whose out supporting Bolt in The Australian this week - doesn't look any more Aboriginal than Geoff Clark? Why did he escape notice? If you're going to race-bait Andrew, don't restrict your attacks to lefties, otherwise it just looks like you're playing politics and it seriously weakens the central theme of your attack (which was weak enough to begin with).

And even more advice: learn to accept that while you might not have committed the slaughter or the land theft, you have directly benefitted from it, as have all other non-Aboriginal Australians.

As a privileged white Australian, you have been allowed to inherit and build generational wealth.

Aboriginal people were not. And the descendants of those Aboriginal people – fair-skinned or otherwise – inherited that disadvantage. That is precisely how disadvantage works.

It's also one of the reasons why the gap is so wide. Denying people their rights – in particular their right to an identity – will do nothing to close it. All it does is harm and offend… and in this case lead to your own public humiliation in a court of law.

And one last piece of advice, Andrew: For generations people like you have been trying to define Aboriginality. And for just as long, Aboriginal people have continued on, unchanged, unaffected.

It must drive you nuts, which certainly helps to explain the vitriol in your columns. But it doesn't explain the errors. Lazy fact checking does.

Andrew Bolt can wax lyrical all he wants about people's identity. He can bang on about 'the Stolen Generation myth'. He can foam about 'professional Aborigines'.

He cannot, however, print lies. And that's precisely what he did.

While-ever there's a buck to be made, there will always be people like Andrew Bolt, there will always be papers eager to print this sort of rubbish, and there will always be those who stand on the sidelines and egg them all on.

On the upside, there will also always be people like those who Bolt lined up for racial realignment, decent, hard-working people who climbed to the top of their respective careers without peddling hatred.

In doing so, they win. Bolt loses. Again.

Chris Graham is the managing editor of Tracker magazine, a publication produced by the NSW Aboriginal Land Council.